The Seconds Before Death

January 7th marked the anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris a year ago.  The attack left a total of 17 deaths with the 10 victims came from the office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.  The two gunmen were killed two days later in a city north of Paris after the manhunt that left the country in a high alert. The gunmen marched in the magazine's headquarter and knew who they wanted to shoot, and they exited the building with their mission accomplished. The dead were the well-known staffs of the magazine which has published controversial cartoons of Muslims for the past years. In November 2011, the office was firebombed after an issue with the picture of Muhammad was published on its cover and despite the tragedy, the magazine stood by what they believe and continued to publish. 

All that aside, in a video recorded by a resident showing the killing of a policeman by the two gunmen, the assailants stopped a black stolen car, got out, and shot a police officer. While the police was injured and still alive on the ground, he looked up at the assailants one last time as the gunmen approached him. One gunman shot the police on the head and he was dead in an instant. 

The closest to death experience I had was when I was six. As I stood in the kitchen doing my oral hygiene, an episode of laughing attack hit me and I choked on the water that I had in my mouth.  Seconds later I became blue in the face and found myself to have a difficult time breathing and luckily my dear mother was home and ran to me and started doing CPR on me and I survive.  I remember to not have any thought as I found myself grasping for every bit of air and trying to regurgitate the water that entered my windpipe.  Maybe because I was too young and did not have much life experience so there was no instant thought or memory. But what about the people who got killed in the two Paris attacks in 2015.  What run across their mind the seconds before they died?  The Paris attack in November 2015 left 130 people dead, majority of the death came from the shooting in the Bataclan theater and most of the deceased were young in their 20s and 30s and still had much to look forward to in their life.  Did the people who died have time to think about their love ones and did they have time to remember the happy parts of their lives?

Death seems like a scary thing and it is an experience that no one has any recollection of. Is death the transition to another life, another earth, a better place? We don't know and no one knows.  The victims of the Paris attacks did not have more time to accomplish what they wanted in life but those of us who are still breathing at this moment still have it.  We still have time to travel to the places we have always wanted to, we still have time to show to another person that we love them, we still have time to get that one career that we always wanted to at a young age, we still have time to reach our goals.  All we have is this life, this one life and we have to make use of it to the best of our ability, because we might not have another life, another chance to enjoy the experience that many people call life.